The premiere of Game of Thrones’ new season has set a new piracy record: over a million downloads in half a day. After people from all over the globe downloaded a copy, next morning there were more than 300,000 BitTorrent users sharing the new episode simultaneously – both on legal and less-authorized channels.

Game of Thrones has become the most pirated show once again, with almost 6 million downloads via BitTorrent. It is followed by Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. Over 50% of downloads occurred in the first week after Game of Thrones aired, and the total exceeds the number of traditional viewers in the United States. Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead accounted for 4.2 and 3.6 million downloads accordingly. Another piracy record broken by Game of Thrones is more than 170,000 people sharing a copy of an episode simultaneously.

David Cameron has praised the bio-flick on Julian Assange, an individual he wants locked up, after viewing just part of it. Prime Minister claimed that Benedict Cumberbatch was brilliant as the WikiLeaks founder in the movie.

The return of Breaking Bad has naturally generated lots of buzz online. In the meanwhile, viewers in the United Kingdom were able to get the latest episode from Netflix and iTunes within hours of its airing in the United States. Nevertheless, a lot of viewers preferred to download the Blood Money episode from torrents instead.

Once season 3 of Game of Thrones was officially released, the very next day its first episode has become the most searched for and downloaded video on file-sharing services. Not long after, the series set a new record with the same TV show.

The director of the movie, Justin Eugene Evans, recently released the first part of his film to BitTorrent through the VODO services, thus joining the ranks of other content creators who have chosen to distribute their work on the Internet through the ever present file-sharing medium.

A couple weeks ago, Grindhouse-style movie called “Hobo With a Shotgun” was mostly unknown to mass public. However, within just several days, the film managed to break into The Pirate Bay’s Top 10 and now is blasted into the iMDB's Top 10. Despite the fact that the movie had been on the radar of the style fans for a while, it could hardly be called mainstream content with its B-movie acting.

However, in early April an interesting thing happened after Hobo’s unofficial copy emerged at BitTorrent networks. Within just a few days the film was found at the 13th place in The Pirate Bay’s rate of most popular movies. Realizing the scale of piracy his film faces, the movie director Jason Eisener hurried to enter the discussion. In the announcement he asked the public stop stealing his movie. Of course, it didn’t work. Since news of a super-entertaining film spread fast, Eisener finally crossed his fingers and began to hope that all the publicity appear good for the film which used to be at position ? 252 IMDb’s Weekly MOVIEmeter. And this worked.

Only ten days later, easily surpassing massive competition, film “Hobo With a Shotgun” ended up at the position No.9 in the IMDb’s Weekly MOVIEmeter ratings, which is just a position behind Limitless and two positions behind Battle: Los Angeles. Nevertheless, it appeared difficult to find any official viewing links for “Hobo With a Shotgun”, because even Google searches were going round in circles. Moreover, even its official website failed to point fans in the right direction, which is at least confusing. Usually, official ways to access content should be easily found or consumers get tired of searching for it and finally turn to any BitTorrent tracker and other unofficial networks. Meanwhile, it’s very easy to provide access to content by adding a simple link on the official website.

Those who would try to take down some illegal links to the movie may find they have a long way to go though, as the statistics indicate that the movie has been downloaded over 150,000 times on BitTorrent thus far.

Along with official announcement of the Oscar winners of 2011, BitTorrent users are also ready to name their own winners – films that accounted for the greatest number of downloads. So, we can start celebrating together with Hollywood.

Before Hollywood stars walk the red carpet at the Academy Awards ceremony, BitTorrent users are invited to visit the dark side of the film industry in order to find out whether their illegal preferences are the same as of Oscar judges. In other words, let’s see which of the nominated movies were downloaded the most on P2P networks.

The statistics taken from most of publicly available torrent trackers clearly shows that the obvious winner is “Inception” – this movie by Christopher Nolan accounted for a striking nearly 14 million downloads. “Inception” is followed by two other runners up for Best Picture: according to the same statistics, “The Social Network” and “Toy Story 3” can boast around 8,5 million and 6,5 downloads respectively. However, it has to be mentioned that although these statistics are quite interesting, they are still affected by release dates. As you can understand, the nominated movies were not released on P2P at the same time, which means that the older releases had more time to gain votes (aka downloads).

Nevertheless, “Inception” would still remain the favored Oscar nominee among Internet users turning to illegal sources if they were only allowed to vote. For example, BitTorrent indexer BTarena is known for having been running an Oscar poll for the last 3 years. There the site visitors are vote for their Oscar favorite nominees across different categories. The results were quite the same: “Inception” was leading with 33%, and then “Toy Story” and “127 Hours” are coming with 12% each.

Apart from choosing the best movie, BTarena members are also able to pick their favorites in some other categories, like the best actors. Thus far, James Franco from “127 Hours” and Natalie Portman from “Black Swan” are leading as the best actor and actress.

However, the BitTorrent users’ opinion seems to hold little predictive value, as in 2010 the Academy members picked “The Hurt Locker” as the best movie, despite the fact that 50% of the BTarena visitors picked “Avatar”. Meanwhile, in terms of downloads a movie “District 9” was leading on BitTorrent last year. This means that Nolan shouldn’t get too excited.

One of the most frustrating things about file-sharing is that a lion share of what we know about it is based not on only on real numbers but also on the beliefs and suppositions. The figures provided by the pro-copyright groups such as the MPAA or the RIAA are largely unreliable, while the unauthorized nature of peer-to-peer networks makes it impossible to estimate any volumes by file-sharers themselves.

“The Expendables”, a star-studded action movie, is making a bold step of issuing a call to arms for “true Men” to take back theaters from such frivolous works like “Sex in the City,” “Twilight,” and particularly “Eat, Pray, Love” from Julia Roberts.

In a month the majority of action movie fans, specifically those created in the 80?s heydays with the likes of Schwarzenegger, Willis, Russel and Stallone, will be presented to a star-studded cast in the forthcoming film “The Expendables”. The latter is already challenging real guys of all ages to take back what is theirs.

The film’s latest trailer issues a call to arms, telling gentleman who are at home doing what the Men are supposed to do that they are literally handing the keys to Hollywood to G.N.O. and teenage girls. Somehow Julia Roberts’ movie “Eat, Pray, Love” came to be the final blow to the men’s patience.

The trailer of the sort you’ve never seen is warning men that in the middle of August, when the movie releases in American theaters, it might be the day to take their last chance to get back what is truly theirs. The forthcoming movie’s cast involves the stars of action films over the last thirty years, including Jet Li, Sylvester Stallone, Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even “Rocky IV” fame’s Dolph Lundgren.

As for me, it’s not clear if this trailer cause more men’s respect or teenage girls’ hate. Either will be interesting to watch, anyway.

What is more interesting for us is that the major part of the film’s call to arms is asking men to watch the film “not off your BitTorrents” but “in a f-cking movie theater.” What they want to say is that if men wouldn’t show up in the theaters and the action movie (heaven forbid) would lose to chick-flicks, then “The Expendables” audience doesn’t deserve to be men.

On the one hand, there might be actually lots of men willing to watch this film in a theater. Perhaps too many guys miss the old action works, where old and beloved Arnold Schwarzenegger fights criminals with a sword, leaving them dangling on a wall. The movie seems to be quite good from the trailers, earning the right to stay off torrents. But, on the other hand, declaring war to “teenage girls” might be not a very wise step, as many of them could be intelligent enough to not get angry on the “real men”, but do something to demonstrate they are a power as well. Something like distributing the movie on the torrents as the very least, or booking out the cinemas to replace “true men” on the seats.